By F M Britto
Raipur, Dec 3-, 2021: A suspended Catholic priest has become a semi-god a year after his death in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.
Hundreds people from other religions now visit “Seva Ashram” (hermitage of service), the late Father Joseph Parecattil had opened in Parsahi village. The Raipur archdiocesan priest died of Covid19 on December 29, 2020. He was 76.
“Miracles continue to take place here due to Baba’s prayers even after his death,” said Asha Lakra, a young leader of the Ashram while addressing devotees after the Mass on December 29, his first death anniversary.
“They adore his photo and grave as if he is a god,” says Sarita Baghel, a Hindu from Bana, a neighboring village.
Many Hindus and some Catholics, who believe his prayers bring healing and solve their problems, continue to attend Friday prayer meetings he had started. They hail him as a healer and a miracle-worker and narrate blessings they have received after praying to him.
Santoshi Khurrey of Bamhnin village says her husband Durga’s leg was healed after attending the priest’s prayer meetings four times. His doctor had advised him to amputate his infected leg.
Shanti Ratre of Kairidih says his habit of taking a drug disappeared after attending the prayer services.
Officiating the Mass on the death anniversary of Father Parecattil on December 29, Father John Y. David, a former parish priest of Parsahi, reminded his devotees of the first of God’s Ten Commandments that God is one and they should not worship any other.
As the Parsahi parish priest for nearly a decade, Father Parecattil had donned a Hindu ascetic’s dress, and drew many non-Christian villagers with prayers for their various needs and healings. People addressed him as Seva Ashram’s Baba (ascetic). The archdiocese ordered his transfer on the complaints that he was doing such things for fame and fortune.
The priest was suspended in 1991 following his refusal to take up the transfer from Parsahi mission parish.
Although the Raipur archdiocese later showed its willingness to revoke the suspension, Father Parecattil preferred to live on his own.
He converted a portion of the church owned property into a pilgrimage center, where nearly 500 people, mostly Hindus, even from faraway places, assembled for his weekly Friday prayer where he prayed for their physical healing and needs.
His devotees insisted on burying his body in the center of his prayer ground, saying that was his desire.
As it was feared then, his devotees are developing his tomb and ashram into a pilgrim center, as he had allegedly desired.
The Covid-19 regulations have reduced the number of devotees turning up for the Friday weekly prayer. But as the lockdown was gradually lifted, more and more devotees started visiting.
But some devotees such as Pransu Banjare of Bamhnin have stopped going to the ashram. “I never stepped in there after his death,” Banjare told Matters India.
Father Parecattil had also educated nearly a dozen poor children and cared some poor widows and elderly. But people accused him of keeping them to maintain his Ashram, graze his expensive cows, to run various shops and do his field work.
A two-story building that Father Parecattil had started building stands incomplete now. Even the number of the cows has reduced.
Some villagers have accused the priest of taking away their land that they had mortgaged to him for taking loan.
One of them, Nirmal Roy of Bana, says he is fighting a legal case to recover his two-acre land that he had “mortgaged” to the priest in an emergency. But the priest had written in the plain revenue paper that it had been “sold” to him for 10,000 rupees.
Protestant Christian Jaya Baghel from Bana says she has topped attending the prayer services, since the devotees worship Christian idols and the priest’s keenness to get money.